Look, I am not the one making extraodinary claims. I am simply asking for proof of claims others make as if they are facts.
If you tell me that you believe or 'know' that there are unicorns on Jupiter, then I must ask you to offer some evidence for the sake of credibility. What else am I to do—just take your word it? Don't be ridiculous.
I make no claims. I simply ask others to authenticate things they claim as facts.
I must say, knowing some Orthodox folks, I’m embarrased for them because of you
I don't really care how you feel. Just provide some evidence of your claims. Stick to the subject.
Kost50! I told you... Mum about the unicorns. No one is supposed to know. If you don’t cease to spread the word about the Jupiterian Unicorns, I’ll have to pull your secret membership :>)
First you must prove the existence of God by your own standards before you can ask us to apply the same criteria.
First, let’s admit that if one is looking for absolute certainty as one might get in geometry for the truth claims about Scripture, or as a course of fact Christianity itself, then Christianity does not offer this. Some will offer historical facts as proof but these by their nature are unable to show geometric certainty due to the complexity of the time-space universe. “Hold on”, might exclaim the evidentialist Christian, “the scientist relies upon rational probability for his empirical evidence, why should Christians make a greater claim”? But this only makes Christianity just another opinion in the interpretation of history.
Now the skeptic believes history is something that floats on an infinitely extended and bottomless ocean of Chance. Therefore he can say that anything might happen. The Christian God revealing himself through prophets and apostles has as good of chance as Unicorns on Jupiter. The free-will Christian is in essential agreement with the skeptic in relation to history since the “possibilities” of history are above God. So these “possibilities” that are above God is the same thing as Chance. A God surrounded by Chance cannot speak with authority. He would be speaking into a vacuum. His voice could not be heard. And if God were surrounded by Chance, then human beings would be too. They would live in a vacuum, unable to hear either their own voices or those of others. Thus the whole of history, including all of its facts, would be without meaning.
If history were what the skeptic assumes that it is, then anything might happen and then nobody would know what may happen. No one thing would then be more likely to happen than any other thing. David Hume, the great skeptic, has effectively argued that if you allow any room for Chance in your thought, then you no longer have the right to speak of probabilities. Whirl would be king. No one hypothesis would have any more relevance to facts than any other hypothesis. Did God raise Christ from the dead? Perchance he did. Did Jupiter do it? Perchance he did. What is Truth? Nobody knows. Such would be the picture of the universe if the skeptic were right.
No comfort can be taken from the assurance of the free-will Christian that, since Christianity makes no higher claim than that of rational probability, “the system of Christianity can be refuted only by probability. Perhaps our loss is gain.” How could one ever argue that there is a greater probability for the truth of Christianity than for the truth of its opposite if the very meaning of the word probability rests upon the idea of Chance? On this basis nature and history would be no more than a series of pointer readings pointing into the blank.
In assuming his philosophy of Chance and thus virtually saying that nobody knows what is back of the common objects of daily observation, the skeptic also virtually says that the Christian view of things is wrong. If I assert that there is a black cat in the closet, and you assert that nobody knows what is in the closet, you have virtually told me that I am wrong in my hypothesis. So when I tell the skeptic that God exists, and he responds very graciously by saying that perhaps I am right since nobody knows what is in the “Beyond,” he is virtually saying that I am wrong in my “hypothesis.” He is obviously thinking of such a God as could comfortably live in the realm of Chance. But the God of Scripture cannot live in the realm of Chance.
The skeptics response when confronted with the claims of God and his Christ, is essentially this: Nobody knows, but nevertheless your hypothesis is certainly wrong and mine is certainly right. Nobody knows whether God exists, but God certainly does not exist and Chance certainly does exist.
When the skeptic thus virtually makes his universal negative assertion, saying in effect that God cannot possibly exist and that Christianity cannot possibly be true, he must surely be standing on something very solid. Is it on solid rock that he stands? No, he stands on water! He stands on his own “experience.” But this experience, by his own assumption, rests again on Chance. Thus, standing on Chance, he swings the “logician’s postulate” and modestly asserts what cannot be in the “Beyond,” of which he said before that nothing can be said.
Of course, what the skeptic is doing appears very reasonable to himself. “Surely,” he says, if questioned at all on the subject, “a rational man must have systematic coherence in his experience. Therefore he cannot accept as true anything that is not in accord with the law of noncontradiction. So long as you leave your God in the realm of the ‘Beyond,’ in the realm of the indeterminate, you may worship him by yourself alone. But so soon as you claim that your God has revealed himself in creation, in providence, or in your Scripture, so soon I shall put that revelation to a test by the principle of rational coherence.”
“And by that test none of your doctrines are acceptable. All of them are contradictory. No rational man can accept any of them. If your God is eternal, then he falls outside of my experience and lives in the realm of the ‘Beyond,’ of the unknowable. But if he is to have anything to do with the world, then he must himself be wholly within the world. I must understand your God throughout if I am to speak intelligently of any relationship that he sustains to my world and to myself. Your idea that God is both eternal and unchangeable and yet sustains such relationships to the world as are involved in your doctrine of creation and providence, is flatly contradictory.”
All this amounts to saying that the skeptic, the lover of a Chance philosophy, the indeterminist, is at the same time an out-and-out determinist or fatalist. It is to say that the skeptic, the irrationalist, who said that nobody knows what is in the “Beyond,” is at the same time a flaming rationalist. For him only that can be which—so he thinks—he can exhaustively determine by logic must be. He may at first grant that anything may exist, but when he says this he at the same time says in effect that nothing can exist and have meaning for man but that which man himself can exhaustively know. Therefore, for the skeptic, the God of Christianity cannot exist. For him the doctrine of creation cannot be true. There could be no revelation of God to man through nature and history. There can be no such thing as the resurrection of Christ.
Strangely enough, when the skeptic thus says that God cannot exist and that the resurrection of Christ cannot be a fact, and when he also says that God may very well exist and that the resurrection of Christ may very well be a fact, he is not inconsistent with himself. For he must, to be true to his method, contradict himself in every statement that he makes about any fact whatsoever. If he does not, then he would deny either his philosophy of Chance or his philosophy of Fate. According to him, every fact that he meets has in it the two ingredients: that of Chance and that of Fate, that of the wholly unknown and that of the wholly known. Thus man makes the tools of thought, which the Creator has given him in order therewith to think God’s thoughts after him on a created level, into the means by which he makes sure that God cannot exist, and therefore certainly cannot reveal himself.
“I do not like the regular Calvinist”, say the skeptic. She tells me that based on my philosophy that no fact can be distinguished from any other fact. For all facts would be changing into their opposites all the time. All would be gobble-de-gook. At the same time, nothing could change at all; all would be one block of ice. Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? He clearly has. I know you cannot see this even though it is perfectly clear. I know you have taken out your own eyes. Hence your inability to see is at the same time unwillingness to see. Pray God for forgiveness and repent.
She claims that I am a creature of God. She says that all facts are made by God and controlled by the providence of God. She says that all men have sinned against God in Adam their representative. She adds that therefore I am spiritually blind and morally perverse. She says all this and more on the basis of the absolute authority of Scripture. She would interpret me, my facts, and my logic in terms of the authority of that Scripture. She says I need this authority. She says I need nothing but this authority. Her Scripture, She claims, is sufficient and final. And the whole thing, she claims, is clear.
(I essentially stole this from Cornelius Van Til, “The Authority of Scripture”. I redacted and rephrased for the present situation.)